Jean Ritchie's Singing Family of the Cumberlands

...the story of the Ritchies beautifully told by the youngest member of the current generation-told in a colloquial idiom that suggests the speech patterns of Eastern Kentucky...The diction never does slip into folksiness...Miss Ritchie has somehow made her style perfectly natural, the only appropriate vehicle for her story. No greater compliment could be paid to a prose writer..The very appropriate and unobtrusive illustrations of Maurice Sendak should be mentioned, for they are what is rare, true illustrations of the text no only in subject but in spirit. William H Jensen, Kentucky Folklore Journal